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Capercailzie, Hashed
Cut the meat all off a cold roast capercailzie into neat pieces. Put it into any gravy that is left; add a little cayenne and a squeeze of lemon juice, and serve very hot, garnished with rolls of fried bacon. Probable cost, 3s.
A leftovers dish: cold roast game, its own gravy, and enough cayenne and acid to wake it up. The whole success rests on heating it without cooking it a second time.
- Do not let it boilCapercaillie is very lean and already roasted; sliced meat held at a simmer turns to string in a few minutes. Bring the gravy to just below a simmer, slide in the meat, and give it two or three minutes only, covered, off direct heat.
- Sourcing the birdThe western capercaillie is a protected species in Britain and cannot be shot or sold there; legally taken birds are still sold in parts of Scandinavia and central Europe. In practice the recipe is made with cold roast pheasant, guinea fowl or dark turkey meat, all of which take the same treatment.
- If there is no gravy leftUse a well-reduced brown chicken or game stock, thickened lightly with a beurre manie, and add any juices from the carving board.
- Why cayenne and lemonCapercaillie feeds on pine shoots in winter and the meat is often said to carry a resinous, slightly bitter note; the heat and acid may be doing more to cut that than to season generally, though the book does not say so. Add the lemon at the end, off the heat.
- Rolls of fried baconThin streaky rashers, stretched with the back of a knife, rolled and secured, then fried until crisp. They can be done while the meat warms.
- Cutting the meat"Neat pieces" means slices across the grain of the breast, about the thickness of a pound coin, and the legs pulled into shreds rather than sliced -- the leg meat of an old bird is sinewy.
- Yield and the priceHow far the leftovers go depends entirely on how much came off the roast. It is not clear whether the '3s.' is meant as the value of the bird or of the dish; the entry does not say.
The capercailzie, or capercaillie, is the largest of the grouse, a turkey-sized forest bird whose name is generally traced to Gaelic roots usually glossed as horse of the woods, though the allusion is unsettled and some authorities prefer a different derivation altogether. It was hunted out of Scotland by the late eighteenth century and reintroduced from Sweden in the 1830s, which is why Victorian cookery books treat it as a fashionable but slightly foreign game bird, usually with warnings that it must be well hung and that its winter diet of pine needles flavours the flesh. Cassell's places this among the hashes because that is what a large game bird produced: one grand roast for the dining room, then a second, smaller meal made from the carcass with the gravy saved from the first, a domestic economy that ran through every substantial Victorian household regardless of the bird involved.